The present invention relates to a character or pattern recognition apparatus for recognizing characters or graphic patterns (hereinafter referred to as characters or character patterns) and, more particularly, to apparatus for recognizing characters through logic processing of video signals generated from the characters or character patterns by an image pickup device such as an industrial television (ITV) camera.
It is generally desirable that a pattern recognition apparatus be able to recognize characters and patterns at a high rate and accurately. One of the applicants herein has already proposed one type of such a character recognition apparatus in commonly owned, copending U.S. Application Ser. No. 504,263, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,556,985, issued on Dec. 3, 1985, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Such conventional processes, however, have suffered from the drawback that the arithmetic operation required to carry them out is highly complicated and time-consuming and is not suitable for processing by a microcomputer.
The present invention eliminates these disadvantages. It is an object of the present invention to provide a character recognition apparatus capable of processing data at higher speed.